The Revolution of Relationship - Beyond Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
Reflection and redesign
Dedicated to the many companions along the way.
On July 14, 1989, exactly 200 years after the storming of the Bastille, four students almost accidentally founded a small IT company. We had the courage — or the naivety — to believe that the ideals of the French Revolution could also guide our entrepreneurial actions: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Over the years, this developed into two prospering companies. Technological innovation flourished, we created jobs and contributed to digital transformation. My company focused strongly on digital collaboration and transformation processes.
But over the years it became increasingly clear that many concepts and implementation attempts remained superficial. The digital revolution promised connectivity but often created new forms of isolation. It promised efficiency but also contributed to that “aggressive relationship to the world” that characterizes our time today. A few years ago, I left my company, which had meanwhile merged with three other IT companies, and focused on psychological counselling. In doing so, I rediscover — almost like a homecoming — philosophy, which had shaped my brief but formative student years with the Jesuits.
I would like to share a few of my current thoughts with you today on the occasion of July 14th.
Venice - where stability emerges from connection. Venice, November 2023.
The Limits of the Liberal Model
What has become of the three great ideals? Liberté was reduced to negative freedom – the right to be left alone. Égalité became formal equal opportunity before the law. Fraternité almost completely disappeared from political vocabulary because it could not be translated into rights and duties.
Liberal thinking from Hobbes to Rawls constructs society as a contract between autonomous individuals who coordinate their self-interests through mutual benefit. This “exchange justice” works as long as – as John Rawls writes – “moderate scarcity” prevails and there is enough for everyone.
But what happens when resources dwindle? When ecological collapse threatens? When societies split apart? Then the fundamental weakness of the liberal model becomes apparent: It can guarantee Freedom and Equality, but not Fraternity. For genuine solidarity requires people who feel responsible for others – not just for themselves.
The Primacy of Responsibility
This is where Emmanuel Levinas comes in, the French-Lithuanian philosopher whose radical ethics designs an entirely different anthropology. For Levinas, human beings are not primarily free, autonomous beings, but responsible ones.
“The primacy of responsibility over freedom,” as his interpreter Corine Pelluchon formulates it, means a revolution in the understanding of the subject. Not: First I am a sovereign individual, then I take responsibility. Rather: Responsibility for the Other constitutes me as a person in the first place.
This responsibility does not arise through rational decision or contract, but through concrete encounter with the Other. In their face, their suffering, their vulnerability, I see not only them, but “all of humanity” looking at me. The Other “calls to me” – and in this calling, my identity as a responsible being emerges.
The Ethical Paradox
Pelluchon shows this using the example of medical encounter: Their dignity is not dependent on the judgment that the professional makes about them. Nevertheless, the way the patient is received and the respect shown to them is decisive. “The dignity of the Other is not relative to my viewpoint, but I vouch for it. That is the ethical paradox that the clinical situation brings particularly clearly to light”.
The structure of the paradox:
Dignity exists independently of my recognition
But my attitude is nevertheless decisive for its realization
I vouch for something I cannot create
This structure applies to all interpersonal encounters: The dignity, uniqueness, humanity of the Other is objectively there – but it only shows itself in the ethical relationship. Without this readiness to “be affected,” no real encounter emerges.
Acceleration versus Encounter
This philosophical alternative becomes urgent when we take Hartmut Rosa's diagnosis of our time seriously. Modern capitalist society functions through “dynamic stabilization” – it must permanently grow, accelerate, innovate to survive. This generates a systematically “aggressive relationship to the world”: Everything becomes a resource to be made available, optimized, exploited.
People become human capital, nature becomes a supplier of raw materials, relationships become networks for one's own advantage. Rosa speaks of the illusion of being able to “make everything available” – with the paradoxical result of “monstrous unavailability” like climate crisis, pandemics, wars.
Here the relevance of Levinas' ethics becomes apparent. His “asymmetry” is the exact opposite of capitalist making-available. The Other “escapes me and does not let me escape” – they are fundamentally unavailable, yet touch me existentially.
A New Trinity: Vulnerability, Responsibility, Justice
The ideals of 1789 need radical redefinition. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité emerged from the struggle against feudal oppression. Today we need concepts that correspond to the condition humaine of the 21st century.
Pelluchon develops from Levinas' ethics a “threefold experience of otherness”:
Vulnerability (deepening Liberté): Not the illusion of autonomous sovereignty, but the recognition of our fundamental dependence on each other. “Life is life against life” – we are all mortal, all can suffer, all need others. This vulnerability is not weakness, but the foundation of genuine encounter. As Levinas writes: “Uncomfortable in one's skin, in one's skin, not having one's skin for oneself” – this existential unhomeliness opens us to the Other.
Responsibility (deepening Égalité): Not formal equal rights before the law, but the recognition that my identity emerges through response to the Other. “Responsibility is not chosen” – it befalls me before I act. I am by responding. This is radical asymmetry: I am responsible for the Other without them being under the same obligation to me.
Justice (deepening Fraternité): The bond between the ethical and the political. From individual encounter with “the Other” to social responsibility for “the Others.” Not rhetorical brotherhood, but the just organization of society out of responsibility.
Substitution as Political Key
Levinas develops the most radical concept: “substitution.” I am not only responsible for the Other, but in place of them – I take on their burden, suffer for them and through them. As Pelluchon shows: “The unconditional nature of the hostage is not the limiting case of solidarity, but the condition of all solidarity.”
This overcomes the liberal logic of exchange: Solidarity does not arise through mutual benefit, but through the readiness for substitutional responsibility. Only thus can community exist even under conditions of scarcity.
Other Purposes of the State
This anthropological revolution would have radical political consequences. If society is not based on the contract of autonomous individuals, but on original responsibility, then the tasks of the state are different.
In climate policy: Not only technical solutions and market mechanisms, but the insight that “our good right to exist” has limits “in the name of the rights of all Others” – including future generations and other living beings. Asymmetric responsibility of rich countries for the consequences of climate change.
In social policy: Not only redistribution according to the principle of exchange justice, but the creation of spaces where people can encounter each other as faces – not as cases, clients, human capital. Institutions must enable ethical encounters.
In migration policy: Not only weighing interests between “our” and “their” rights, but recognition of asymmetric responsibility for the causes of flight and migration. The Other has a face before they have citizenship.
In democracy: “Citizen participation” would not mean that interest groups assert their claims, but that people jointly take responsibility for the common good. Pluralism as “experience of otherness” instead of populist fusion.
Working on the Not-Yet
The thoughts seem utopian and yet are quite practical.
Working on the Not-Yet manifests itself in concrete encounter. People come in existential situations that demand a human response. I cannot give this response without being affected myself, without making “space in my existence” for them.
This is exhausting. It is unpredictable. It cannot be standardized. But it is the only thing that helps. And it shows: A society based on original connectedness rather than strategic cooperation is not only philosophically elegant – it is practically necessary.
July 14, 2025: A New Revolution?
236 years after the French Revolution, we face similarly fundamental challenges. No longer feudalism and absolutism threaten humanity, but acceleration capitalism and ecological collapse.
The answer cannot lie in better technology or more efficient markets. It lies in an anthropological turn: the recognition that we humans are first responsible, then free. That relationship comes before autonomy. That ethics precedes politics.
Vulnerability, Responsibility, Justice – understood as shared neediness, substitutional affectedness, asymmetric solidarity – could become the revolutionary ideals of the 21st century. A revolution that does not destroy the old with violence, but creates the new through relationship.
On July 14, 1989, we founded an IT company with the ideals of the revolution of 1789. On July 14, 2025, Levinas invites us to a revolution that is even more radical: the discovery that we have always been connected with each other.
This article emerges from intensive reading of Corine Pelluchon's “Understanding Levinas” and forty years of engagement with Emmanuel Levinas' philosophy – from the first encounter in Gert Haeffner's lecture at the University of Philosophy in 1984 to the current project of a “Connectivist Psychology” for the 21st century.
